The Effects of Acute Exercise on Cognitive Functions in Patients with Schizophrenia and Healthy Adults.

Aging is associated with cognitive decline across multiple domains (; ) and is the single greatest risk factor for the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (). From a life course perspective, an individual’s risk for age-related cognitive impairment depends upon both their peak level of cognitive function attained in early adulthood as well as their subsequent rate of decline from this peak level with increasing age (). Epidemiological studies have identified a number of modifiable risk factors during adulthood (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, and social isolation) that are associated with individual differences in cognitive aging and dementia risk (). Because adulthood health and lifestyle factors are at least partially shaped by early life circumstances (; ; ; ), associations between adulthood factors and cognitive outcomes may be confounded by early life exposures. Thus, it is critical to evaluate aging from a lifespan perspective to understand the complex pathways, beginning in early life, that contribute to the striking heterogeneity in cognitive aging outcomes across individuals. Childhood adversity is highly prevalent in early life, with approximately 64% of adults experiencing at least one adverse exposure prior to the age of 18 (), and has been linked to individual differences in adult health and cognition (; ; ). Early life adversity is traditionally defined as negative exposures, such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction (; ; ), that reflect deviations from the expected environment and that require significant adaptation from the child (). Adverse childhood exposures have also been associated with childhood socioeconomic conditions: While adversities can occur at every socioeconomic level, children raised in the lowest income gradient have greater odds of exposure to adverse events (; ; ; ). There remains some debate, however, about whether childhood socioeconomic factors should be treated as an adverse exposure itself (; ; ; ) or as a distal environmental context that shapes risk for adversity (; ). Given the strong co-occurrence between childhood socioeconomic conditions and adversity as well as the methodological challenges in distinguishing the influence of each construct, we adopt the former perspective in this study. Although a number of studies have previously documented the negative relationship between early life adversity and adult health outcomes (; ; ; ), relatively few studies have examined its association with adult cognition. Though limited, this literature has consistently found that greater childhood adversity is related to both worse cognition in adulthood (; ; ) and greater risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease (; ).